Rachel Krall is Back | Dark Corners by Megan Goldin Review

I was lucky enough to receive an ARC of Megan Goldin’s Dark Corners which is the sequel to her most popular novel The Night Swim. Thank you NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for sending me the book! I had hoped to read and review it before it released, but alas I’m a couple weeks late, oops! All opinions are my own (as we all know by now I don’t hold back).

Nonetheless, I’m glad I made the time to finally get to this novel. You may not know this, but when I picked up The Night Swim three years ago, I absolutely fell in love with the story and Goldin’s writing. It was one of the first books that helped get me back into my reading habit after college firmly shunted me out of it (did any of you also have this problem?).

My Rating: 3.75 ⭐️

Rachel Krall, the true crime podcaster star of Megan Goldin’s acclaimed Night Swim returns to search for a popular social media influencer who disappeared after visiting a suspected serial killer.

It was wonderful to revisit Rachel Krall in her latest investigation. While it took me a bit to get into the story, by the end I enjoyed it and thought the twists and reveals were very well done. That’s not to say that I loved this novel, because I didn’t unfortunately. One of the first things that I noticed was how Goldin’s writing style has changed. I admit it’s been a few years since I read The Night Swim, but from memory I always really appreciated that despite the fact it’s a mystery/thriller, the writing style didn’t fall into the quick and direct route that many thrillers use. To me, the way that novel was written gave a lot of emotional weight to the story. That’s not something I felt when reading Dark Corners, which follows the much more customary writing the befits the thriller genre. (If you’ve managed to pickup the Unsub series by Meg Gardiner that I read earlier this year, I’d say the writing is similar.)

As a thriller novel in and of itself, I think Dark Corners is well done and has a great ending. However, as a follow up to The Night Swim, this just left me wanting. If you’re a fan of the genre, then I would definitely recommend you pick up Dark Corners for a fast-paced read with a familiar face. Just know that you won’t really be getting The Night Swim 2.0.

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***A couple spoilers here that I just need to get off my chest***

• I understand that Thomas’s body odor was an important point, but oh my god if I had a nickel for every time his “rotting garbage” stench was was mentioned I could probably pay off my credit card bills. It began to feel like every few pages was about his smell and I just started to get sick of being hit in the face with it.

• Rachel’s romantic entanglement with Joe… I did not care for it a bit. To me it just felt very out of place and unnecessary to the story.

• Also, did anyone else have a difficult time pinning down the character’s ages for the first half of the book? I got the impression that Terence was much older, then got confused in the middle when we found out a bit more of his backstory, and then when it said he was 27 at the end?! That is not at all who I pictured and it just threw me off. A similar thing happened with Joe Martinez. I thought he was a much older man and then when the whole Rachel-Joe thing happened, I realized he was much younger than I thought.